AT**&**T, isn’t it?
Heh, when I took my ground school course, we learned that a lot of the weather report stuff that pilots deal with have abbreviations which have no relation to their current names (though the abbreviations are at least distinctive from eachother. Kinda.)
The A&M in “Texas A&M University” used to stand for “Agricultural and Mechanical”, but now just stands for “A&M” since they have expanded to include not only non-A&M related sciense stuff, but also a fairly robust liberal arts program.
I seem to recall a bit of dialogue in 2010 (the book) discussing the IBM - 111 = HAL, but I don’t recall what the general jist of the conversation was.
My father worked there.
We’d been moved.
Crappy (as in failing to perform) employees are usually fired. Especially if they work for companies like IBM.
Cheesesteak has pretty much hit the nail on the head. Once you get transfered out of a managers group, their relationship with you ends. It is entirely possible that difficult employees found themself transfered frequently or it could just be the nature of the culture at IBM that transfers are frequent (and from what I understand, it is).
It has been my experience with large corporations that such a high level of coordination and centralization rarely exists. There’s over 100,000 IBM employees. It’s seem ridiculous that the head office would be moving individuals around like Zeus on Mt Olympus in order to try to get them to quit.
It’s a self-emergent system. No need for a queen bee to be involved at all. A worker ant simple has to make sure that “he’s not my problem anymore”, and his part is done.
Having worked (as a contractor) at Big HAL, I can attest to the moving and intimidating of employees. It was a rather disgusting thing to watch. But that was around the time that Aker (?) became CEO, and the policy began to shift to “breathe wrong and your ass is outa here.”
It was an exciting time to be part of the Blue Elephant.